pp.server - Produce & Publish Server
Project description
pp.server - Produce & Publish Server
pp.server is a Pyramid based server implementation and implements the server side functionality of the Produce & Publish platform. It is known as the Produce & Publish Server.
The Produce & Publish Server provided web service APIs for converting HTML/XML + assets to PDF using one of the following external PDF converters:
PrinceXML (www.princexml.com, commercial)
PDFreactor (www.realobjects.com, commercial)
PhantomJS (free, unsupported)
In addition there is experimental support for generating EPUB documents using Calibre (www.calibre.org, open-source).
In addition the Produce & Publish server provides a simple conversion API for converting format A to B (as supported through LibreOffice or OpenOffice). The conversion is build on top of unoconv.
The web service provides both synchronous and asynchronous operations.
Requirements
Python 2.7 (tested)
or Python 3.3 (experimental)
the external binaries prince, pdfreactor and/or unoconv must be in the $PATH. Please refer to the installation documentation of the individual products.
Installation
create an virtualenv environment (Python 2.7 (or Python 3.3)) - either within your current (empty) directory or by letting virtualenv create one for you. (easy_install virtualenv if virtualenv is not available on your system):
virtualenv --no-site-packages .
or:
virtualenv --no-site-packages pp.server
install the Produce & Publish server:
bin/pip install pp.server
create a server.ini configuration file (and change it according to your needs):
[DEFAULT] debug = true [app:main] use = egg:pp.server reload_templates = true debug_authorization = false debug_notfound = false [server:main] use = egg:waitress+main host = 127.0.0.1 port = 6543
start the server (in foreground):
bin/pserve server.ini
or start it in background:
bin/pserve server.ini --daemon
Converter requirements
For the PDF conversion the related converter binaries or scripts must be included in the $PATH of your server.
prince for PrinceXML
pdfreactor for PDFreactor
phantomjs for PhantomJS
ebook-convert for Calibre
API documentation
All API methods are available through a REST api following API URL endpoint:
http://host:port/api/1/<command>
With the default server configuration this translates to:
http://localhost:6543/api/1/pdf or http://localhost:6543/api/1/unoconv
PDF conversion API
Remember that all converters use HTML or XML as input for the conversion. All input data (HTML/XML, images, stylesheets, fonts etc.) must be stored in ZIP archive. The filename of the content must be named index.html.
You have to POST the data to the
with the following parameters:
file - the ZIP archive (multi/part encoding)
converter - a string that determines the the PDF converter to be used (either princexml, pdfreactor, phantomjs or calibre for generating EPUB content)
async - asynchronous (“1”) or synchronous conversion (“0”, default)
cmd_options - an optional string of command line parameters added as given to the calls of the externals converters
Returns:
The API returns its result as JSON structure with the following key-value pairs:
status - either OK or ERROR
data- the generated PDF file encoded as base64 encoded byte string
output - the conversion transcript (output of the converter run)
Unoconv conversion API
The unoconv web service wraps the OpenOffice/LibreOffice server mode in order to perform document conversion (mainly used in the Produce & Publish world for convertering DOC(X) documents to HTML/XML).
Remember that all converters use HTML or XML as input for the conversion. All input data (HTML/XML, images, stylesheets, fonts etc.) must be stored in ZIP archive. The filename of the content must be named index.html.
You have to POST the data to the
with the following parameters:
file - the source files (multi/part encoding)
async - asynchronous (“1”) or synchronous conversion (“0”, default)
cmd_options - an optional string of command line parameters added as given to the unoconv calls
Returns:
The API returns its result as JSON structure with the following key-value pairs:
status - either OK or ERROR
data - the converted output files as ZIP archive (e.g. a DOCX file containing images will be converted to a HTML file plus the list of extract image files)
output - the conversion transcript (output of the converter run)
Asynchronous operations
If you set async to ‘1’ in the API calls above then both calls will return a JSON datastructure like
{‘job_id’: <some id>}
The job_id can be used to poll the Produce & Publish Server in order to retrieve the conversion result asynchronously.
The poll API is provided through the URL
http://host:port/api/1/poll/<job_id>
If the conversion is still pending the API will return a JSON document
{‘done’: False}
If the conversion has finished then a PDF/Unoconv specific return JSON document will be return (same format as for the synchronous API calls). In addition the key-value pair {‘done’: True} will be included with the JSOn reply.
Introspection API methods
Produce & Publish server version:
returns:
{“version”: “0.3.2”, “module”: “pp.server”}
Installed/available converters:
returns:
{“unoconv”: true, “pdfreactor”: true, “phantomjs”: false, “calibre”: true, “princexml”: true}
Other API methods
Cleanup of the queue directory (removes conversion data older than one day)
returns:
{“directories_removed”: 22}
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